Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists

The Politics of Modernism is a fantastic look at the way that political climates inform artistic movements. It's got a very specific Marxist bent to it, but the idea that art is not something we make up out of the air is compelling. He argues that in every generation the bourgeois produce unique, distinctively bourgeois dissidents. Modernism wasn't just an artistic movement, it came also from calls for women's rights, anti-imperialism, etc. I was shocked to read his assessment of the present economic crisis: "Managed affluence has slid into an anxiously managed by perhaps unmanageable depression. Some political consensus underlying it has been visibly breaking down, and especially at the level of everyday life [...] the dominant messages are of danger and conflict, and that the dominant forms are of shock and loss [....] Yet these rhythms are familiar to history. They can be traced, with some accuracy, to a dying social order and a dying class" (96). Except that this was written in 1972, which proves that these things are cyclical, despite their appearance of being unique every time. I have to confess at this point that I am, in fact, a literary Marxist a lot of the time, but after reading Williams' manifesto you'll probably find that you are too.